Login
Not many of the projects I’ve worked on have been released yet as they’re all recorded very recently and have to go through a long marketing strategy design process.
A lot of my day-to-day sessions I’m miking up guitars, drums and vocals, or doing session prep for other producers. At the moment writing and producing is still just something I do after hours but is going to be something I do more and more of over the coming years.
As many engineers do, I started as a musician. Constantly picking up guitars whenever I could then progressing to teach myself piano until I got lessons a few years later. After getting FL Studio on an old Compaq notebook I decided I wasn’t so much interested in the performing in front of people, but writing and producing music. After deciding that was the path I wanted to go down I went on to study music / sound technology for 5 years, which led to my first job as an assistant engineer.
My taste in music has changed a lot over the years, there would constantly be music playing at the home I grew up in, people like Paramore, Evanescence, Linkin Park and Eminem. Those were the sorts of artists my mum played, my dad’s taste was much more niche, he’d play people like Igorrr and Ruby My Dear, Dillinger Escape Plan and a lot of hardcore / breaks style stuff which he used to DJ. Being born into the streaming era, when I started searching for my own taste in music, I initially liked a lot of american rappers, G-Eazy, Drake and Logic then as I began producing more music started listening to more electronic music, house, bass-house and drum & bass. Being a keen pianist has meant there’s always a sprinkling of solo piano / orchestral music to balance things out after a stressful day.
Over the last year I’ve met quite a lot of very successful musicians, all of who have inspired me and reminded me that even the people at the top are just normal people with great passion and greater dedication. I don’t think that’s something that can really be faked or copied, but certainly something we should try aim at.
I think one of my strengths is not getting very frustrated. Sometimes things seem to not work in the way we think they should, but allowing emotions to influence the situation won’t help fix the problem.
A good point though would be getting frustrated retrospectively at how much time was spent on tiny, almost inaudible differences, which is then time taken away from looking at the bigger picture, focusing on the very obvious features that really should have much more attention. Like spending 35 minutes processing a snare drum or something, to then put a quick EQ chain on guitars and a quick vocal chain with much less attention than it deserved.
Remembering to allocate as much time as possible to the most important is a much better process, so if time is very short, making a quick list of what needs doing and how much time should ideally be spent on each section.
In writing I’m a very in the box person. Komplete is a constant source of inspiration for me, kontakt and massive X are incredible. I also use Serum a lot and, dare I say it, splice can be a great tool to add ideas to my tracks which add a lot of interest as the sounds are created by a producer with a completely different set of influences and tools to myself.
Don’t compare yourself to everyone around you. We all start the journey at different times and walk at different paces. No two paths are the same either, and just because some people seem to not like your music, doesn’t necessarily mean the music is bad, but perhaps you haven’t found the right audience for it yet.
I’ve been working a lot in headphones as long as I’ve been making music, 6/7 years. At first because I didn’t have a good pair of studio monitors, then on getting a pair of monitors, because of the influence of room acoustics causing imperfections in frequency response so drastic it would be extremely difficult to get a very balanced mix.
Now I can trust the accuracy of what I’m hearing so there’s no second guessing about colouration from speakers, getting from a demo to a rough mix to a finished mix can be done in 1/2 the time.
I can hear much more of the fine details in reverb tails and how different reverbs (and other FX) are corresponding with each other, which has improved the sonics of my productions more than any plug-in or processing tip ever could.
I was recently producing / engineering for Coyote Joe Bastard, being able to cut the speakers and flip to the Audeze whilst the chaos of a session was going on behind me meant I could comp efficiently and get a quick vocal chain I can trust together in a matter of minutes after tracking new parts. A breath of fresh air compared to doing it with other headphones where often the processing I’d done on a vocal didn’t translate to the speakers as I expected it to. I’ve also used them in the same way in sessions with Byron Messia, and will keep doing so on future sessions.
